


all his haunts were home

by aosc



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: M/M, Post-Chapter 13, Pre-Slash, WoR-setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-28 22:15:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10840563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: Cindy’s face distorts. “Oh, honey,” she murmurs. Her palm drifts down the flat of the sword’s curved blade. “It’s what we’re fighting for, ain’t it? You just - got to keep waving the flag. Even when you think you can’t.”





	all his haunts were home

* * *

 

They find documentation in Zegnautus, wandering the deserted hallways with the ailing intent of men already defeated. Craggled old parchment bindings, teachings of the Starscourge. Detailed lab reports, slabs like concrete stone, bound in journals detailing the progress of infected. Of test subjects injected with the bacteria containing the virus. Who last - years, in a light infused environment. Who won’t begin to show signs of being infected until the shadows grow fatter, the nights grow longer, as the winter half year approaches.

 

Test subject #674, male, 6’5, 185 pounds, originally from a tiny area roughly 3 kilometers south of Cartanica, a scrap of village as small as a non-existent spot on a world map, was driven out into Eusciello. Dropped on an Imperial base deep in the ridge, scarred with permafrost and perpetually dark, save for the mottled bruise light of the glacier.

 

In forty eight hours the disease had so rapidly spread that major organ function is completely blown out. In another three hours, heart failure was a fact.

 

Prompto quits reading here, already numb with grief; he doesn’t need to see this. Doesn’t need to see that the detailing on his stamped wrist, the etchings that he’s scratched raw, reads, at the very end, 01987. A death sentence in permanent ink, if he were unlucky. A biological weapon, if he were - lucky. Fortune is a finicky thing, and, either way, in the Empire, and by the way of the Gods, she is _cruel_.

 

“C’mon,” says Gladio, and tugs, lightly, on Prompto. His palm is half closed over the bare knob of his shoulder. “We can’t stay here.”

 

His voice is rough. Prompto thinks that it’s a wonder his actions are so contrasting; so gentle, in the face of the situation they’re facing. The short fuse, hot tempered Gladio that he knows would have gone rampant. Killed every daemon in sight. Every MT; his giant broadsword a cleaver, swung two handed, streaked with the inky thick blood, trailed with bodily matter twisted into something dark.

 

Prompto goes, hesitant to allow his own grip on a coffee stained manila folder to slip, but eventually does. He shoulders Ignis out of the cramped monitor scrub, but is unsure of whether he’s being supported, or if he’s the one doing the supporting.

 

The streets of Gralea are littered with ruin: entire complexes are crumbling, glass and rock and wildly slithering cables stuffed with electricity are beaten out across the streets. In a few alley ways that are particularly murky, they hear daemons. The electrically charged Bombs, which emit faint whirring, sparking noises. The lumbering of an Iron Giant or two, crammed between two buildings, too clunky, too otherworldly and huge to properly fit. The easy pitter patter of Goblin tails flicking into crumbs of marble that has shattered on the pavement.

 

They pass quickly, quietly; scurry, rat-like, from crossing to crossing, keeping in the shower of electrical sparks and the occasional, still working streetlight, nauseatingly green and flickering ominously.

 

He doesn’t want to say anything - knows that there is a time and a place for grief, and it’s not here. Not in the belly of the beast, in the behemoth’s lair, in which they’re currently looking for a way out of without awakening what’s slumbering there. But it’s building, the messy tangle of questions, and non-answers, and sadness, and _betrayal_. It’s this orange, yellowish ugly emotion that hooks its talons into his heart and turns the muscle into something angry and deeply _stricken_. Prompto doesn’t know how to deal with anything like it because he’s never experienced anything that is close to what he’s currently feeling. He’s burning up, roiling with it, his steps lurching, heart faltering -

 

“Magitek engine!” Ignis hisses, and tugs Prompto sharply down and into the burnished thicket of a once-neatly trimmed hedge. Gladio follows suit, the bulk of his body bulging out over the top, but, as luck would have it, the landscape has been torn up and rearranged into something ridged and unshapely. Gladio’s curved back, punctuated by a few knobbly branches of the thicket, stands out starchly against anything orderly, but here, he looks like any other broken up part of the scenery.

 

The buzz, jarring in the ground, traversing up and through the asphalt and into Prompto until he’s almost itching with it, his teeth clicking together hollow and noisily in the death of the long night, grows in strength as the Magitek ship draws closer. If he weren’t so fed up with the Gods, he’d pray to the Six for them not to be discovered. But, as it is now, he’d rather face an entire squadron of Magitek soldiers - of successful experiments, unlike himself and subject #674, than to think about the Gods coming to their aid.

 

Luck, or favor, or plain dumb circumstance, has the looming shape of the ship whirring over their heads, unseeing them there in the debris.

 

They slough through, once they’re certain the ship has passed safely and distantly. Avoid the meandering groups of daemons to the best of their abilities. At one point, they end up in the midst of a flock of Goblins, because they appear at the most inconvenient of places. But mostly, they actually make it unscathed, their first bout of forsaken luck coming when they’ve stopped hoping for fortune to ever turn an eye in their direction. None of them say anything, but in Prompto, the disillusion has taken root; sprawled, open legged, in the space in which his conviction has been bottled up, seeped out, for every moment he’s spent in the company of -

 

Well. This isn’t the place for grief.

 

*

 

“So the - the, favor of the Gods, that was all for _nothing_? We searched out the tombs for nothing? The - the trial of Titan, the favor of Ramuh, Leviathan destroying an entire city - _nothing_?”

 

“Prompto.” Ignis’ voice is hard with grief, but delicate, also for the same reason. “We know naught of the intentions of the Hexatheon. Speculating on whether the sky will fall will sooner bring about misfortune than the sky actually falling will.”

 

Gladio pokes in the meager fire with a long, thin branch. Here, in the depths of Caem’s harbor, no daemons spawn, even under the threat of the dark night sky. They have taken temporary refuge here for a few days. “Iggy’s right,” he says, “It wasn’t all for nothing.”

 

“How can you say that?” Prompto snaps. He twists up at his feet, facing Gladio, viper quick, heart snapping against his ribs. “How can you know that?”

 

Gladio, temper roiling beneath his thin skin, lets go of the branch. He’s up on his feet just as fast. “Watch it,” he growls, “Watch it _very_ _carefully_.”

 

“Or what?”

 

“Or I’ll _make_ you shut your trap, Prompto. You’re thinner than the twig I used for stirring the fire, don’t make me prove it.”

 

“ _Oh yeah_?” Prompto’s voice breaks, laden with cracks that have come both from exhaustion and from emotional turmoil.

 

“Quiet down, the both of you!”

 

Ignis has also gotten to his feet. The longer the days grow, the more of them pass, the surer his footing gets, the smoother his face becomes, concentration mellowing out when he can allow for his instincts to take over his stepping. “Behaving like children,” he snaps, “Given the circumstances, I certainly expect more of you. Regardless of what has happened, nothing of which we can speculate in without looking like fools - it has not been for naught. It has been written, a prophesy that I do not think you realize the gravitas of: The Chosen will bring about the Light. Now, since this meager sliver of hope is all we can, for now, cling to, I trust that you cling to it like _no other_. That you _abide_ by it, and that you _bless_ it. That you cease allowing grief to dictate your actions and your words, and that you start acting like you will not allow for instinctual emotions to overrule rationality.”

 

Prompto sinks to his feet again, upper body quivering, knees giving way for his weight, his breath unsteady. At his back, a splatter of salt, and the squalling sea, unforgiving of past undoings and present mistakes.

 

*

 

Prompto dreams - of that night.

 

He lunges for the Crystal. His heart is beating in his mouth, so thick and pulsating and copper tasting he think he’s going to be able to spit it out right there on the solid stone. He’s been running, fighting, so hard that he’s forgotten how to breathe properly - his lungs are straining, bursting almost past his ribs. His throat is closing up, tongue swelling from where he bit it, barely scraping past a Mindflayer’s tentacles wrapping crushingly around his ankle, just as he’d shot it point blank in its featureless maw.

 

The Crystal, magnetic pull, prismic light that had previously lit the entirety of the Keep’s upper floors, has faded. Closed up, like a clam shell, now hard, and ridged, and silent. Where it had echoed, strange, otherworldly pulses of noise ricocheting off of the walls with metallic tangs, it is now - eerily quiet. He’s chugging through a slug of black matter - daemon blood, and guts, and the crawling remnants of MT limbs that haven’t stopped moving. Spasms of the alien, red Magitek ozone makes discordant arms, and limp legs, twitch. He’s running, only he can’t run, because there’s the Crystal -

 

“ _Noct_!” he screams, with a voice that is not his own, distorted and twisted through, tangled in despair, and Prompto falls -

 

*

 

Right before Ignis had left for Lestallum, for a position within the refugee quarters and the scattered and herded together band of people who’d decided to attempt to restore some semblance of order to the city oncemore, he’d sat with Prompto by one of the rattling, corroding tables by the Hammerhead garage, splitting a bottle of Old Lestallum single malt.

 

On the tabletop, Prompto draws a line with a broken off Assassin’s Dagger for each day in darkness that passes. “Do you think it’ll ever end?” he asks, though, once he realizes he’s wondered out loud, he’s not sure of whether he meant to do that or not. There’s a needling feeling in his gut, made warm and roiling with the alcohol.

 

Ignis remains quiet for a few beats. Distantly, the whirring electricity of three elemental Bombs grow closer to the encampment. From the station building, the noises of the gathering of hunters melt together into diffuse bouts of murmurs, exploding every once in a while, when one or another particular voice grows in strength.

 

“ _There once lived a man, born to a mortal but blessed with powers divine. Conjuring a collection of glaives he dispelled the darkness plaguing our star. As a reward for his efforts, the god granted him a holy Stone — the Crystal, which he was to guard at all costs, for it would one day choose a King to see us through the coming disaster and lead us to salvation_.”

 

Prompto looks out, past the bolstered gates and past the blobs of bright lights that line the entirety of the fence. Across the deserted highway, a trio of Flan have spawned, the alien, crackling noise of their wet side over the parched, dry landscape making him alert, vigilant, despite the deliberate haze of the alcohol. “Yeah, I know,” he says, “but the Iggy _I know_ doesn’t blindly trust in – prophecies,” Prompto waves both his hands for emphasis, the bottle leftover on the tabletop, “Not without proof.”

 

Ignis’ draw of breath is loud. “Prompto – “ he begins, but cuts himself off, as though unsure of what to say. Like so many other times, when they’ve gone down the road of this exact discussion.

 

Prompto grabs the neck of the bottle again. “No, forget it,” he says, “I know.” He feels wrung out, like an old rag, one of those dirty scraps of linen that Cindy had used to wipe down the Regalia’s flanks with. “I just don’t get how long we’re supposed to wait. I feel like, at the end of the road, there’ll be that stupid Crystal, hard and grey and – dead. And all the Gods spitting at our feet, laughing ‘cause we held out for something that could’ve been a mistake. A mistranslation or somethin’. That Noct’s not coming back, you idiots. You’re just dragging the inevitable out. Hurry up and die.”

 

“This is not the work of the Gods,” says Ignis. His hand is curled, white knuckled, on the table, his features angled sharply in Prompto’s direction. “You know fully well what and who drove us deeper into Zegnautus Keep, on that day. What force engineered this. Direct your anger there, Prompto. This – despair, it’s poison. It’s going to eat at you, until there is naught left but spite.”

 

“ _It took Noct_ ,” Prompto grinds out – suddenly, vehemently, angry, once more. The emotions that he stuffs down his throat each time they’re out on the plains, hunting for when rations are running low, because they have no place there. “It was supposed to help combat the daemons and it _took_ him, Ignis. How long – how _long_ , are we going to have to wait for him to _come_ _back_? How long can we wait before we’re completely wiped out? The only thing left of mankind a mural on some goddamn cave wall in the Vesperpool, where some godforsaken, sorry bastard’ll hide until the end of his days? We don’t – “ he pulls on a breath, shuddering with unshed tears, “We don’t even _have_ the Crystal here. I can’t even – ‘cause it’s – it’s not _here_.”

 

He shakes with anger and sadness and the state of the world, all the whilst Ignis remains quiet at his side, fingers curling and uncurling in the only display of the turmoil that also plagues him, but that he won’t let loose. A trigger twitch in his wrists hiding the whorl of a hurricane.

 

*

 

There is a winged, masked creature that is shot through with ice, curled in a cartoonish render of a storm cloud, from which there rains a hail of brimstone and where the rain, once slick and translucent and soaking, has turned into rivulets of deep, liquid fire. Smoothing into a riverbed, overturned with flat, whetted stones that have the imprints of a draconian’s thick claws. A jagged, needle toothed jaw that has broken mile wide mountains into mere dust laid to rest beside where the fire beds into the cracks in the earth.

 

*

 

Once Prompto wakes, he realizes, with a glance at his watch through eyes lined with sleep grit, that the time is half past one in the afternoon, and that despite this, once he peeks through the blinds, the world is perpetually dark. Not even a streak of stars can be seen crossing the overhead sky.

 

Gradually, he learns to forget about the dreams. They stay with him, peppering his thoughts with onslaughts of sensation, creeping on the back of his neck, but he forgets, in broad strokes, what they were about. Who featured, and what slipped away from him this time.

 

Painstakingly, he makes his way out of the trailer. He waves a perfunctory hand at Talcott, and a slew of the other volunteers turned weathered hunters, where they’re supporting one another along the outer fence, precariously balancing a length of wire between the lot of them. They’re strengthening the poles, hammering them down and slowly building another layer of fence onto the original one. On the poles, where there’d once been nothing more than a rough saw ending to the wood, there’s now an extension of the pole, upon which steel beams, scavenged from abandoned constructions all over Duscae, are mounted with large overhead lights, still running off of the sparse electricity that Exineris can provide from Lestallum. They savor it, don’t use it for personal endeavors, so that it can power the lights around the refugee centers, and the Hammerhead and Meldacio hunter HQ’s. They’re far in between, the locations still protected by able men and women, but mostly because they can’t afford to become overwhelmed from several cardinal directions, anymore than they can frequently travel between the spots. There’s not enough fuel, headless bravado, or man power, to go around for that.

 

There is an itch that he knows he’s not allowed to scratch on the back of his neck, where an unfortunate encounter with a Griffin, swooping down over him and his team taking out a duo of Nagas near the shores of Galdin Quay, had nicked him to the bone. “Y’all are lucky Dave was out there with you,” said Cindy, once they’d returned to HQ.

 

She’d stalked over to Prompto, taken him non too gently by the elbow, and lead him to beneath a spot of strong light inside the station. He was light headed, swimming slightly with pain, blood blurting thick, and slow, down the knobbly path of his spine. “‘Else you would’ve been easy prey, hunter. A wound this serious.” Cindy, delicate when handling mechanical parts, is equally adept, these days, with human anatomy. She disinfected the area around the wound, fingers picking about the incision with otherworldly stillness, a type of preciseness you couldn’t find in an ordinary person.

 

“Buck up, this one’s going to make you feel your own mortality,” Cindy muttered from a spot to his left. Prompto, head bowed, and told to be very still, if you value your ability to kick about for a few more years, licked at the sprained glass he was nursing, sloshing with old Cleigne wheat whisky someone had dug up from an old cot out in the badlands a few weeks prior.

 

It’d been a few weeks ago, he doesn’t feel it as innately now as he did then. It will bleed into the remainder of him, scarred across and straight through, and mellow out into hair line fractures and distant memories. Blur into just another patch of what he is now, right up until there’s another spot in which he can’t both fight off an onslaught from the south, and watch his own back from the opposing direction, and he’ll take another blunt hit from a Lich’s viper dart attack.

 

From outside the fencing, the nauseating blubber of a spawning site rumbles to life. A yawn of lavender bleeding into black, sparks of something otherworldly shooting the matter through, as the thick forearm of a Red Giant climbers over the top - blunt, long cleaver in hand.

 

The gathering at the perch of the area building on the fence have gone quiet. Talcott’s hushed whispers come through to Prompto in patches, instructing the ones unused to seeing the daemons so close up ahead, unused to where they’ll lumber over, steps making the very foundations of the Hammerhead buildings rattle, core materials shivering, and stop just outside the perimeter of the lights. The Giant remains there, just like any other, sword dragging long, jagged lines into the earth, the occasional growls bubbling up through its disfigured throat maintaining a cadence that is threatening, but which Prompto’s long learned to ignore. He continues across the site, heart hammering, but tightening his fingers into curls of fists, refusing for fright to get the better of him. If it breaches, it disappears; there’s not a daemon that risks the light.

 

“Howdy, you.” Cindy’s sitting cross legged on the floor, just by the main counter, once Prompto enters the Coernix Station-turned rest site. “Heard there’s a right ruckus outside.”

 

Prompto salutes her, in lieu of greeting. “Yeah, you know how it is. Talcott’s a riot.”

 

Cindy’s mouth slopes in amusement. “If anybody’s trying for a riot ‘round here, it’s you, mister,” she looks out, towards the nailed over windows. “Another one of them fiery Giants?”

 

Prompto hums. “Yeah. Didn’t look like it’d do anything, though.” He’s closing the distance between them, all the while trying to figure out what it is she’s working on. There’s a spotted flap of tarp covering up most of the length of whatever it is that Cindy has by her crossed ankles, and only an array of tools spread out at her right hip. But the length of it suggests that it’s a weapon. “You workin’ on something?”

 

Cindy shrugs somewhat. “Just a lil’ somethin’,” she says. She reaches for a slim hex key with a taped handle. “Ain’t nothin’ that she hasn’t seen before, but it’ll tune her up nicely.” She pulls on the tarp, folding it back so that she can better reach for what she’s doing with the hex -

 

Prompto’s breathing hitches, his lungs stuttering up and colliding with his breastbone. Cindy hauls the old Engine Blade up to balance on her knee, screwing a bolt into its place on one of the circular pumps. Its hilt is mucked up with use and discoloration, and a few of its tiny, chromed Crown City-stamped screws are sitting just by her left boot.

 

Prompto shakes the feeling off of himself, like a dog shedding water from its fur. “You trying to revive that old thing?” he says, weakly, “Isn’t it just - scraps of metal that could be put to better use?”

 

Cindy hums. He’s learned, by now, that she’s not ignorant of shifts in his - or anybody else’s - moods, she’s just precariously edging around them so that it doesn’t have to become A Thing each time someone steps on a delicate, proverbial foot. “Yeah, maybe so. Most’a these parts’ll do wonders for upgrades,” she looks at Prompto. Her fingers tighten on the hilt, somewhat, a spasm of nerves making her nails skitter down the bare metal of it. She looks away again. “Just think it’s nice, not to break it all up. Sometimes, momento’s just what the gals and guys out here need. Brings ‘em to a better place of mind, you know?”

 

Outside, the Red Giant growls again. It turns, Prompto thinks, judging by the sudden shift in how the ground beneath them shudders. The screws rattle astray across the floor. Slowly, its steps recede away, become distant as it lumbers on out of the immediate vicinity of the station.

 

Prompto releases a breath he doesn’t ever realize he’s holding, until it makes him light headed and make spots appear in the peripheral of his vision.

 

“You really think it helps?” he asks, once the silence has settled over them, blanket thick and almost heady. His voice feels small, even to himself. Some days, the dreams come back to him, even if he doesn’t ever say - a name, think of a face, blurry with day’s passed and with the perpetual darkness clouding what little memories of sunshine, and an almost tangible mix of citrus and sandalwood, that he still has left.

 

Cindy’s face distorts. “Oh, honey,” she murmurs. Her palm drifts down the flat of the sword’s curved blade. “It’s what we’re fighting for, ain’t it? You just - got to keep waving the flag. Even when you think you can’t.”

 

*

 

He dreams of the Crystal, dispatched in a grove in an overgrown forest. Its shape remains a hard, stalagmite shell, reminiscent of the rocks that poke through the ceilings of the once lavish suites of the Galdin Quay resort now. In this dream, the ridges, the scar tissue of where it has closed up, has become whetted by time and by the situate in the mouth of a waterfall, a tiny opening in the grove’s green walls over which water continually spills.

 

On the once plush forest mat, then populated by Sylleblossoms, a trail of waste has spread from below the rock. A layer of permafrost has descended over the grove, its trees shriveling up into curls of naked branches. It spreads, disease like, down the walls, twisting up into the remnants of an old Temple, piercing the white marble of what was once an altar.

 

The water, the cascade that hacks away on the Crystal’s toughened shell, turns murky. Along with the descending sun, creeping down beneath the ridges of old, old mountains in the far west, splicing on the teeming valleys of where once, some God or another, brought rage down upon the earth and split it into separate pieces, it turns sludgy and thick.

 

The sun, discoloring the twilight sky, disappears beneath the only looming building in vicinity. The large mansion, situated on its own, floating island. Behind, it leaves a trail of red protozoa, a spear of cherry light, weaponized matter that raises, from the dried Sylleblossoms, blubbering patches of lilac and black, opening up into the ground licorice dark and inky, from wherein monsters lurch to a state of awake with quaking rumbles.

 

On the horizon, Odin’s belt, a peppering of bright stars, sinks invisible into the sky.

 

Prompto launches himself forward, remembering that this dream, like so many other dreams, places him in a dreamscape he cannot later recall the details of, only ever the same, rewinded happenings: he is entirely too late, and at his feet, daemon’s limbs, MT’s lopsided arms and legs sawed off at the juncture of the knee, where no bones and no tissue allows for the limbs to bend in all directions, reach for him from impossible angles. He claws - lopsided, seeing as he remains on his feet - through thickets of bushing that is alive, its thorny branches reaching for his elbows, shoulders, neck. The Crystal’s size diminishes, the distance growing ever greater despite the fact that Prompto remains in transition, moving ever forward.

 

In these dreams, he never reaches the Crystal. When he is just there, within touching distance of the looming rock, hands outstretched, mind singularly on Noct’s desperate screams, on Ardyn’s convoluted, maniacal laughter - the landscape tilts, the Crystal disappears, and he stumbles forward, over a ledge, down, falling into a crawlspace tunnel that holds no oxygen, and where he can’t reach to clutch at his throat, the hordes of daemons and bodiless MTs remain holding onto him -

 

Prompto pitches forward. The dream, as many others, holds no sensations acutely connected to elements: the sun doesn’t beat down on his neck, the rocky path doesn’t pinch underfoot, the chill of the moonlight doesn’t leave trails of goose bumps on his bare arms.

 

He falls, expects that now, the darkness will rush forward, envelope him, cut the air supply off -

 

His knees break the surface of the simmering dam.

 

Distantly, he notices that the riverbed is sharp with gravel. Before him, towering and almost encased in water, the Crystal looms erect. Its cocoon shape an oval of dark, slick rock.

 

Prompto reaches out. He expects darkness. Always, always, darkness. A suckering dimension in which any and all light breaks apart, becomes matter.

 

His fingertips touch solid rock.

 

Through a crack, he thinks he can imagine a shard of prismic light leaking out, a ricocheting, otherworldly noise ringing out from a tight, encased space that has no end, like dropping a coin into a well and hear it fall ever continuously, never pinging off the innards and hit solid ground.

 

*

 

When he wakes up, he can’t breathe, lungs too stuffed with the aging, dry dust feeling of a feeling long forgotten. A sensation of wanting to claw open his ribs from the inside. Before long, Prompto realizes he’s crying, twisted sweaty and almost choking on the lack of oxygen in his thin sheets. He can’t seem to stop it, so after a while, when the sensation stops being overwhelming, once he realizes he can ride it out - he allows for it to continue. For every scar, and aged bruise, and lost comrade, to wash over him.

 

*

 

He comes to with the slamming of the doors to Talcott’s ratty truck, large bolts holding the wheel houses together about to rattle loose and come off. The man has a set of pipes, thinks Prompto, and palms at his hair, limp and tangled with grime on the back of his neck, as he listens to the man’s insistent voice. He scratches over the thick ridge of scarring. Yawns, exhaustion slamming into him like a pack of Coeurls coming at him all at once.

 

The caravan has aged with the times: its paper thin walls have hollowed out. The windows, cracked through and barred, filter more noise through than they keep in. Talcott is joined by another set of steps. They’re lithe, moving with intent and as someone who knows the importance of not wasting their position via their gait. One of the Meldacio veterans? Prompto can’t imagine how he’d be able to make it back and forth in that short of time. Once upon a time, maybe, but not now, despite the fact that Talcott can and knows how to drive like a professional car thief – or just like someone who’d ploughed through their adolescence on the roads between Cleigne and Duscae on the chase from daemons and wild animals.

 

“ – even got some former Imperials fighting for us. The toughest of ‘em said – lead a band of mercenaries.”

 

“Talcott,” says Prompto, shouldering the door to the caravan open – it sticks when the weather is particularly cold, “Aranea can hear you talking about her all the way from Caem. Who doesn’t know – “

 

“… Prompto?”

 

Prompto blinks.

 

Beside Talcott, whose shoulders are thick, slabs with muscle, is a man veering on the side of malnourished, way too thin and gangly. His hair is shoulder length, unkempt, and his beard looks as though it’s seen better days. His jacket is caked with grime. Below his eyebrow is a shallow cut that’s scarred the wrong way. Prompto would know, he’s got an almost identical one that, fortunately for him, is only visible beneath the glare of harsh spotlights.

 

“What – “ he mutters, and scrubs at his eyes. The man remains, one toe poking in the dirt before him. He pulls a few fingers – one adorned with a fat, black ring – through his fringe, slicking it back and from his face.

 

“I can’t be that unrecognizable,” says the man, voice rough from disuse, and tilts his head.

 

In the ruddy light, his cheekbones still manage to stand out, chalked out regal on the planes of his face. The strong profile of his nose – the knife cut of his lips. The drop he makes of Prompto’s stomach, bottoming out until there is nothing left of him, lost to gravity and a knee weak tug downwards. He clutches on the door frame, a little harder than he means to. “You can’t be _real_ ,” he says, in reply to that, and shakes his head.

 

And once, so many years, and battles, and lives lost ago that Prompto’s lost count to a perpetually pitch black world, the man might have continued to scrape his boot in crescents in the mud, brow drawing into a frown, unsure of how to handle the situation. A little off kilter, all the time, his reactions continually selling him short of what he’s actually feeling.

 

Now, he passes Talcott with a firm clap on the arm, and starts toward Prompto. Prompto distantly thinks that he can wrap his fingers around the Mythril Gun stuffed down the holster on his left thigh, have it cocked before him in a second flat; it won’t be enough to kill a daemon, but it’s enough to stun them, just to purchase himself enough time to get out of its way.

 

But – he’s not going to do any of that.

 

Because the man, with a name long avoided, never spoken, draws up before Prompto, one hand, nails lined with blood and tiny cuts, reaching out for him –

 

It lands, solid, real, _warm_ , on the shoulder that elongates down and into his tattooed wrist. Noct’s fingers bunch in the fabric of his shell jacket, become pale with the pressure with which he digs into Prompto’s bony shoulder. Prompto thinks that it should hurt. Probably – does, on some physical level. But it’s not nearly enough to batter away at the feeling that’s gnawing up through his stomach, that’s eating on him – warm and cold and interchangeably short of breath.

 

He gulps on the flakey oxygen, and drinks in the sight of Noctis, quite obviously just as aged as the rest of them, his eyes, an otherworldly, depth of the ocean-blue lined, the sheen to them not as it were, childish and naïve and ten years younger.

 

Prompto releases the door casing, and reaches out to clasp at the bend of Noct’s elbow. The skin there is elevated with scarring, and scratchy with dirt. But he’s warm to the touch, firmly there, unmoving from the spot before Prompto, below the rusty steps that lead into the caravan.

 

“How’s that for real,” Noct says, and tightens his grip again where it’s slackened. He chews on his bottom lip momentarily, until it’s swollen with blood. His voice is still a croak of a thing, which cracks straight down the middle until there are almost chasms between the words. He attempts to clear his throat. “Sorry,” comes out, wrung completely dry.

 

Prompto laughs. A broken off, botched thing that almost can’t pass for laughter, and pulls at Noct until he knocks closer into Prompto’s collar, until Prompto can bow his head only tilting slightly downwards, and smell something otherworldly in Noct’s hair, something borne of light, and prismic. Like sunrise cracking through the thick dark of night. Like a prophetic King returning home. And, farther, beneath this, the chalk and crackle of ozone and the starchiness of glacial air, that Prompto’s been able to smell – and forgotten the smell of, ever since Noct gained the favors of the Hexatheon, he smells of sandalwood, and of citrus.

 

Of a home long forgotten.

 

Of a home, long awaiting to be reclaimed.

 

*

 

**Author's Note:**

> the tale of the 700 word-drabble that turned into a 5500 word-angstfest. so sorry. ending obviously deviates from canon as i'm trash.


End file.
